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I am a Natural Born United States Citizen with NO allegiance or citizenship to any nation but my own, and will use this site as a hobby place of sorts to present my own political and religious viewpoints, as a genuine Constitutional Conservative and a genuine Christian Conservative.

Thank you for coming. -------------------------------------------------------------------In the Year of our LORD Jesus Christ 2017

--As of January 20, 2017

A Sigh Of Relief With The Inauguration Of Donald John Trump as President of the United States of America, And Hope For A Prosperous Future For All United States Citizens (we who are a nation called "the melting pot of the world"). We shall be great and exceptionally great again.

Peace and Liberty. Semper Fidelis.

Monday, April 8, 2013

Margaret Thatcher, 1925 - 2013, A Leader Of Conservatism For Her And Our Times

Prime Minister Thatcher: "People on all levels of income are better off than they were in 1979.
The hon. Gentleman is saying that he would rather that the poor were
poorer, provided that the rich were less rich. That way one will never
create the wealth for better social services, as we have. What a policy.
Yes, he would rather have the poor poorer, provided that the rich were
less rich. That is the Liberal policy! Yes, it came out! He didn't intend it to, but he did. I give way to the honorable gentleman.MAN: The prime minister is aware but I detest every single one of her domestic policies and I have never hidden that fact....

Prime Minister Thatcher: And I think that the honorable gentleman knows that I have
the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of East
Europe who have experienced them. I think I must have hit the right nail
on the head when I pointed out that the logic of those policies are
they'd rather have the poor poorer. Once they start to talk about "the
gap," they'd rather the gap was that, down there. That. Not there. But
that. So long as the gap is smaller -- so long as the gap is smaller --
they'd rather have the poor poorer. You do not create wealth and
opportunity that way. You do not create a property-owning democracy that
way.

Margaret Thatcher: There are two ways in which any government can proceed.
One is a way based on what you and I would call a free society, which is
enshrined right at the heart of the American Constitution. The other
one is a way which allows only one view both of economics and politics
and which almost everything is either owned or controlled by the state,
including the media, including the ideas, including freedom of
discussion and everything. There is no freedom of discussion. Now,
between those two ways, the free society and the totally controlled
society, there are, of course, variations. I think what we've learned
in Britain is that we've gradually, over the last certainly 12 or 13
years, with perhaps a little interruption, gone slowly further and
further away from the free society towards something else.

... At the same time we've found -- I don't find it strange,
but some other people do -- that we have stopped creating wealth. We've
had a large number of increasing restrictions. And you've been finding
two things: First, that we are more and more concentrating on
redistributing the wealth we've got, rather than creating any more. To
create more, you need a slightly freer society, and you need an
incentive society. Naturally when I see that happening, I look with
very great alarm to societies which have gone even further left. That
is, they've tried to redistribute even more and haven't had the
incentives for people working hard on their own account, doing well for
their families and often then being able to create jobs for others,
they've produced a much more prosperous society than we have. But by
and large you've got the two broad, different economic and political
approaches.

When the great Prime Ministers of Great Britain of the 20th century are remembered, there shall be two who shall stand out pre-eminently among them all. Winston Churchill, who stood forth in the hour of Britain's need, who helped the United Kingdom in his leadership to have the moral resolve to resist being captured and consumed by the National Socialist Party of Germany's military juggernaut...and Margaret Thatcher, who stood forth when the United Kingdom was being threatened with financial insolvency under the weight of Socialism's "borrow and spend what it neither had nor could ever repay" policies. Prime Minister Thatcher and her administration gave the United Kingdom the path out out of insolvency and back into prosperity. Lady Thatcher helped give Britain back a new and needed restoration of standing among the nations of the world (with a little help from fellow Conservative President Ronald Reagan

"across the pond" / the Atlantic Ocean, as it were).

Much of the wisdom in which she gave as the already proven successful pathway out from "under" the crushing burden of Socialism by her and her administrations, is much of the same wisdom for the path we need to be practicing, not just promoting, today.

The following is an article of a Speech Lady Thatcher gave in November 1994 at Hillsdale.

“Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.”

March 1995

The Moral Foundations of Society

Margaret Thatcher

Former Prime Minister, Great Britain

Margaret Thatcher was born in 1925
and went on to earn a degree in chemistry from Somerville College, Oxford, as
well as a master of arts degree from the University of Oxford. For some years
she worked as a research chemist and then as a barrister, specializing in tax
law. Elected to the House of Commons in 1953, she later held several
ministerial appointments. She was elected leader of the Conservative Party and
thus leader of the Opposition in 1975.

She became Britain’s first female
prime minister in 1979 and served her nation in this historic role until her
resignation in 1990. In 1992, she was elevated to the House of Lords to become
Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. The first volume of her memoirs, The Downing
Street Years, was published in 1993 by HarperCollins.

In November 1994, Lady Thatcher
delivered the concluding lecture in Hillsdale Center for Constructive
Alternatives seminar, “God and Man: Perspectives on Christianity in the 20th
Century” before an audience of 2,500 students, faculty, and guests. In an
edited version of that lecture, she examines how the Judeo-Christian tradition
has provided the moral foundations of America and other nations in the West and
contrasts their experience with that of the former Soviet Union.

The Moral Foundations of the American
Founding

History has taught us that freedom cannot
long survive unless it is based on moral foundations. The American founding
bears ample witness to this fact. America has become the most powerful nation
in history, yet she uses her power not for territorial expansion but to
perpetuate freedom and justice throughout the world.

For over two
centuries, Americans have held fast to their belief in freedom for all men—a
belief that springs from their spiritual heritage. John Adams, second president
of the United States, wrote in 1789, “Our Constitution was designed only for a
moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any
other.” That was an astonishing thing to say, but it was true.

What kind of
people built America and thus prompted Adams to make such a statement? Sadly,
too many people, especially young people, have a hard time answering that
question. They know little of their own history (This is also true in Great
Britain.) But America’s is a very distinguished history, nonetheless, and it
has important lessons to teach us regarding the necessity of moral foundations.

John
Winthrop, who led the Great Migration to America in the early 17th century and
who helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared, “We shall be as a City
upon a Hill.” On the voyage to the New World, he told the members of his
company that they must rise to their responsibilities and learn to live as God
intended men should live: in charity, love, and cooperation with one another.
Most of the early founders affirmed the colonists were infused with the same
spirit, and they tried to live in accord with a Biblical ethic. They felt they
weren’t able to do so in Great Britain or elsewhere in Europe. Some of them
were Protestant, and some were Catholic; it didn’t matter. What mattered was
that they did not feel they had the liberty to worship freely and, therefore,
to live freely, at home. With enormous courage, the first American colonists
set out on a perilous journey to an unknown land—without government subsidies
and not in order to amass fortunes but to fulfill their faith.

Christianity
is based on the belief in a single God as evolved from Judaism. Most important
of all, the faith of America’s founders affirmed the sanctity of each individual.
Every human life—man or woman, child or adult, commoner or aristocrat, rich or
poor—was equal in the eyes of the Lord. It also affirmed the responsibility of
each individual.

This was not
a faith that allowed people to do whatever they wished, regardless of the
consequences. The Ten Commandments, the injunction of Moses (“Look after your
neighbor as yourself”), the Sermon on the Mount, and the Golden Rule made
Americans feel precious—and also accountable—for the way in which they used
their God-given talents. Thus they shared a deep sense of obligation to one
another. And, as the years passed, they not only formed strong communities but
devised laws that would protect individual freedom—laws that would eventually
be enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Freedom with Responsibility

Great Britain, which shares much of her
history in common with America, has also derived strength from its moral
foundations, especially since the 18th century when freedom gradually began to
spread throughout her society Many people were greatly influenced by the
sermons of John Wesley (1703-1791), who took the Biblical ethic to the people
in a way which the institutional church itself had not done previously.

But we in
the West must also recognize our debt to other cultures. In the pre-Christian
era, for example, the ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had much to
contribute to our understanding of such concepts as truth, goodness, and
virtue. They knew full well that responsibility was the price of freedom. Yet
it is doubtful whether truth, goodness, and virtue founded on reason alone
would have endured in the same way as they did in the West, where they were
based upon a Biblical ethic.

Sir Edward
Gibbon (1737-1794), author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote
tellingly of the collapse of Athens, which was the birthplace of democracy. He
judged that, in the end, more than they wanted freedom, the Athenians wanted
security. Yet they lost everything—security, comfort, and freedom. This was
because they wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them.
The freedom they were seeking was freedom from responsibility. It is no wonder,
then, that they ceased to be free. In the modern world, we should recall the Athenians’
dire fate whenever we confront demands for increased state paternalism.

To cite a
more recent lesson in the importance of moral foundations, we should listen to
Czech President Vaclav Havel, who suffered grievously for speaking up for
freedom when his nation was still under the thumb of communism. He has
observed, “In everyone there is some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity,
for moral integrity, and for a sense that transcends the world of existence.”
His words suggest that in spite of all the dread terrors of communism, it could
not crush the religious fervor of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union.

So long as
freedom, that is, freedom with responsibility, is grounded in morality and
religion, it will last far longer than the kind that is grounded only in
abstract, philosophical notions. Of course, many foes of morality and religion
have attempted to argue that new scientific discoveries make belief in God
obsolete, but what they actually demonstrate is the remarkable and unique
nature of man and the universe. It is hard not to believe that these gifts were
given by a divine Creator, who alone can unlock the secrets of existence.

Societies Without Moral Foundations

The most important problems we have to
tackle today are problems, ultimately, having to do with the moral foundations
of society There are people who eagerly accept their own freedom but do not
respect the freedom of others—they, like the Athenians, want freedom from
responsibility. But if they accept freedom for themselves, they must respect
the freedom of others. If they expect to go about their business unhindered and
to be protected from violence, they must not hinder the business of or do
violence to others.

They would
do well to look at what has happened in societies without moral foundations.
Accepting no laws but the laws of force, these societies have been ruled by
totalitarian ideologies like Nazism, fascism, and communism, which do not
spring from the general populace, but are imposed on it by intellectual elites.

It was two
members of such an elite, Marx and Lenin, who conceived of “dialectical
materialism,” the basic doctrine of communism. It robs people of all
freedom—from freedom of worship to freedom of ownership. Marx and Lenin desired
to substitute their will not only for all individual will but for God’s will.
They wanted to plan everything; in short, they wanted to become gods. Theirs
was a breathtakingly arrogant creed, and it denied above all else the sanctity
of human life.

The 19th
century French economist and philosopher Frederic Bastiat once warned against
this creed. He questioned those who, “though they are made of the same human
clay as the rest of us, think they can take away all our freedoms and exercise
them on our behalf.” He would have been appalled but not surprised that the
communists of the 20th century took away the freedom of millions of
individuals, starting with the freedom to worship. The communists viewed
religion as “the opiate of the people.” They seized Bibles as well as all other
private property at gun point and murdered at least 10 million souls in the process.

Thus 20th
century Russia entered into the greatest experiment in government and atheism
the world had ever seen, just as America several centuries earlier had entered
into the world’s greatest experiment in freedom and faith.

Communism
denied all that the Judeo-Christian tradition taught about individual worth,
human dignity, and moral responsibility. It was not surprising that it
collapsed after a relatively brief existence. It could not survive more than a
few generations because it denied human nature, which is fundamentally moral
and spiritual. (It is true that no one predicted the collapse would come so
quickly and so easily. In retrospect, we know that this was due in large
measure to the firmness of President Ronald Reagan who said, in effect, to
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, “Do not try to beat us militarily, and do not
think that you can extend your creed to the rest of the world by force.”)

The West
began to fight the mora! battle against communism in earnest in the 1980s, and
it was our resolve—combined with the spiritual strength of the people suffering
under the system who finally said, “Enough!”—that helped restore freedom in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—the freedom to worship, speak, associate,
vote, establish political parties, start businesses, own property, and much
more. If communism had been a creed with moral foundations, it might have
survived, but it was not, and it simply could not sustain itself in a world
that had such shining examples of freedom, namely, America and Great Britain.

The Moral Foundations of Capitalism

It is important to understand that the
moral foundations of a society do not extend only to its political system; they
must extend to its economic system as well. America’s commitment to capitalism
is unquestionably the best example of this principle. Capitalism is not,
contrary to what those on the Left have tried to argue, an amoral system based
on selfishness, greed, and exploitation. It is a moral system based on a
Biblical ethic. There is no other comparable system that has raised the
standard of living of millions of people, created vast new wealth and
resources, or inspired so many beneficial innovations and technologies.

The
wonderful thing about capitalism is that it does not discriminate against the
poor, as has been so often charged; indeed, it is the only economic system that
raises the poor out of poverty. Capitalism also allows nations that are not
rich in natural resources to prosper. If resources were the key to wealth, the
richest country in the world would be Russia, because it has abundant supplies
of everything from oil, gas, platinum, gold, silver, aluminum, and copper to
timber, water, wildlife, and fertile soil.

Why isn’t
Russia the wealthiest country in the world? Why aren’t other resource-rich
countries in the Third World at the top of the list? It is because their
governments deny citizens the liberty to use their God-given talents. Man’s
greatest resource is himself, but he must be free to use that resource.

In his
recent encyclical, Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul I1 addressed this issue. He
wrote that the collapse of communism is not merely to be considered as a
“technical problem.” It is a consequence of the violation of human rights. He
specifically referred to such human rights as the right to private initiative,
to own property, and to act in the marketplace. Remember the “Parable of the
Talents” in the New Testament? Christ exhorts us to be the best we can be by
developing our skills and abilities, by succeeding in all our tasks and
endeavors. What better description can there be of capitalism? In creating new
products, new services, and new jobs, we create a vibrant community of work.
And that community of work serves as the basis of peace and good will among all
men.

The Pope
also acknowledged that capitalism encourages important virtues, like diligence,
industriousness, prudence, reliability, fidelity, conscientiousness, and a
tendency to save in order to invest in the future. It is not material goods but
all of these great virtues, exhibited by individuals working together, that
constitute what we call the “marketplace.”

The Moral Foundations of the Law

Freedom, whether it is the freedom of
the marketplace or any other kind, must exist within the framework of law. 0thenvise
it means only freedom for the strong to oppress the weak. Whenever I visit the
former Soviet Union, I stress this point with students, scholars, politicians,
and businessmen—in short, with everyone I meet. Over and over again, I repeat:
Freedom must be informed by the principle of justice in order to make it work
between people. A system of laws based on solid moral foundations must regulate
the entire life of a nation.

But this is
an extremely difficult point to get across to people with little or no
experience with laws except those based on force. The concept of justice is
entirely foreign to communism. So, too, is the concept of equality. For over
seventy years, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had no system of common law.
There were only the arbitrary and often contradictory dictates of the Communist
Party. There was no independent judiciary There was no such thing as truth in
the communist system.

And what is
freedom without truth? I have been a scientist, a lawyer, and a politician, and
from my own experience I can testify that it is nothing. The third century
Roman jurist Julius Paulus said, “What is right is not derived from the rule,
but the rule arises from our knowledge of what is right.” In other words, the
law is founded on what we believe to be true and just. It has moral
foundations. Once again, it is important to note that the free societies of
America and Great Britain derive such foundations from a Biblical ethic.

The Moral Foundations of Democracy

Democracy is never mentioned in the
Bible. When people are gathered together, whether as families, communities or
nations, their purpose is not to ascertain the will of the majority, but the
will of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, I am an enthusiast of democracy because
it is about more than the will of the majority. If it were only about the will
of the majority, it would be the right of the majority to oppress the minority.
The American Declaration of Independence and Constitution make it clear that
this is not the case. There are certain rights which are human rights and which
no government can displace. And when it comes to how you Americans exercise
your rights under democracy, your hearts seem to be touched by something
greater than yourselves. Your role in democracy does not end when you cast your
vote in an election. It applies daily; the standards and values that are the
moral foundations of society are also the foundations of your lives.

Democracy is
essential to preserving freedom. As Lord Acton reminded us, “Power tends to corrupt,
and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” If no individual can be trusted with
power indefinitely, it is even more true that no government can be. It has to
be checked, and the best way of doing so is through the will of the majority,
bearing in mind that this will can never be a substitute for individual human
rights.

I am often
asked whether I think there will be a single international democracy, known as
a “new world order.” Though many of us may yearn for one, I do not believe it
will ever arrive. We are misleading ourselves about human nature when we say,
“Surely we’re too civilized, too reasonable, ever to go to war again,” or, “We
can rely on our governments to get together and reconcile our differences.”
Tyrants are not moved by idealism. They are moved by naked ambition. Idealism
did not stop Hitler; it did not stop Stalin. Our best hope as sovereign nations
is to maintain strong defenses. Indeed, that has been one of the most important
moral as well as geopolitical lessons of the 20th century. Dictators are
encouraged by weakness; they are stopped by strength. By strength, of course, I
do not merely mean military might but the resolve to use that might against
evil.

The West did
show sufficient resolve against Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. But we failed
bitterly in Bosnia. In this case, instead of showing resolve, we preferred
“diplomacy” and “consensus.” As a result, a quarter of a million people were
massacred. This was a horror that I, for one, never expected to see again in my
lifetime. But it happened. Who knows what tragedies the future holds if we do
not learn from the repeated lessons of history? The price of freedom is still,
and always will be, eternal vigilance.

Free
societies demand more care and devotion than any others. They are, moreover,
the only societies with moral foundations, and those foundations are evident in
their political, economic, legal, cultural, and, most importantly, spiritual
life.

We who are
living in the West today are fortunate. Freedom has been bequeathed to us. We
have not had to carve it out of nothing; we have not had to pay for it with our
lives. Others before us have done so. But it would be a grave mistake to think
that freedom requires nothing of us. Each of us has to earn freedom anew in
order to possess it. We do so not just for our own sake, but for the sake of
our children, so that they may build a better future that will sustain over the
wider world the responsibilities and blessings of freedom.

For those of us who lived the time, many of us were positively excited politically by and highly respectful of Lady Thatcher. A BBC Documentary (linked in 4 parts) on Lady Thatcher's time as Prime Minister, is done in a such a way, as if the producers of it were psychologically and physically sedated or tranquilized. I have still yet included the video and youtube links to it below:

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Christian Foundations Lost From U.S. Education

Islamic Terror attacks since 9/11/2001...Why Islam is NOT a religion of "peace".

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About Me

A Born-Again Christian Conservative and Fundamentalist. A Republican with a very pro-defense, pro-US Cold War view of politics and the world. I also have, as a non-Jew, a Pro-Israel political and religious position as a born-again Christian Conservative.